Inspiring ideas and community through arts and technology collaborations.

har·mon·ic (här-mon-ik)

adj.
1. Of or relating to harmony.
2. Integrated in nature.
n.
1. Any of a series of musical tones whose frequencies are integral multiples of the frequency of a fundamental tone.
2. Physics A wave whose frequency is a whole-number multiple of that of another.

What we are:
Harmonic Laboratory is a collective of artists, thinkers, educators and innovators that investigate the human experience through the integration of media and common theme.

What we do:
Our mission is to integrate art, science, and the humanities in the development of creative works that tell stories and unpack the dense cultural content around us. We believe such projects serve a greater educational purpose and enrich community through performative art. Harmonic Laboratory is committed to providing resources and support to projects and participants that endeavor to cross boundaries of discipline, ideology, and form in the creation of innovative and compelling artwork.

Meet the Members

Meet Brad Garner | Choreographer/Dancer

Contemporary Dance is an evolution of Western concert dance that plays between extremes of movement form and subject. There is no formal adherence to narrative, in the Contemporary vernacular movement itself is a valid and interesting subject. What is exciting to me about contemporary dance is play between these two extremes, the ability to look completely outside the box for new ways to shape human movement into art.

My choreography changes according to the subject matter of a given piece. Sometimes the work is of a romantic nature, lifted, lyrical, baroque, other times it is a comment on modern technology, mechanical, systematic, and direct. I do not set stylistic rules for myself…I don’t have to. I can blend the wrestling athletic nature of contact improvisation with the lines and arcs of classical ballet. I can pull through space with the rhythmic isolations of jazz, or fall and tumble in and out of the floor like capoeira. My choice of subject reflects these dualities, the openness of the Contemporary form. My work draws connections between seemingly unrelated topics, gaps and missing information, beauty and age, humans and volcanoes. The combination of my work, my investigation into these topics, with that of others, the process of one informing the other, is fascinating and exciting.

Meet: Jeremy Schropp | Composer/Musician

From an early age, I knew that music would be a significant part of my life. I remember the day that I first sat down at the piano and played a melody back by ear…filling me with a strange sense of accomplishment and quickly resulting in formal piano lessons with my mother. Throughout my childhood, she taught me to consider creativity, self-expression, and artistic diligence as being fundamental to my personal growth and development. Though I have since transitioned from a performer to a composer, I nostalgically reexamine those early days of musical study and discourse so that I can attempt to maintain that sense of wonder, first experienced as a child at the piano, within my music.

Composition provides a wonderful outlet for self-expression, but I continuously find myself intrigued by the potential of intermingling different art forms. Through the years, I have experimented with various traditional compositional approaches, employing both standard acoustic musical forces and electronic elements. Yet, when I began collaborating with artists from different disciplines, my creative mind was expanded and inspired.

Today, I strive to incorporate material from multiple disciplines into each new work. Whether translating speech rhythms from poetry into musical rhythmic motives, or deriving musical gestures and timbral textures from a dancer’s physical movement, I realize that these outside influences help nuance and clarify my artistic voice. As a result, I consider myself honored to be a founding member of Harmonic Laboratory. I have the pleasure of collaborating with an extraordinary group of artists and academics that continue to inspire, inform, question, and affirm my intent as an artist.

Meet: John Park | Animator/Programmer/Digital-Artist

There is always something to do, an idea to bring to life, someone who wants to learn. I am an animator and academic on paper, for the purposes of communicating my occupation, but animator does little to describe my perspective or my craft. I consider myself to be an investigator of motion, space, time, elegance, and their points of intersection with technology. I can see and think inside these terms. Education, art, and the making of things are the products of my investigation, the natural consequence of asking questions and looking for answers.

When I work in time-based art I like to think about the transitions between space and time. While fixed animation allows me to hold and maintain control over the piece by crafting a complete experience, interactivity forces me to create a tone, or environment that allows the user to craft a unique experience of their own. Interactivity forces us to question our boundaries in terms of our own work. How much do you let go? Do you make the decision here, or do you let the audience have control? Do you trust your audience to make good decisions? If so, how can you enable them in an experience? If not, how do you keep them out of trouble?

Collaboration surely intersects with this idea. In an environment of academia where interdisciplinary work is lauded yet rarely seen, a University can be an isolating location of specificity. There is room to promote collaboration in the classroom, but it is a trickier to find in interpersonal practice. I’d like to see time spent talking and sharing the small truths we find in everyday life.

My small truths revolve around issues of the power of technology, lifestyle, and the ignition of creativity. This is the time in history to promote creative solutions to the problem of the excess material around us. How can we use and reuse things, take them apart, recombine, completely abandon their original uses in favor of new or improved ones? What role does the creation of virtual things play in this? Three lines of code can perform a thousand mundane tasks in a few seconds. And while there is value in the programming and processing of the mundane, I am intrigued by the possibility of the programming and processing of a thousand exquisite tasks. A performance unbound by resources, art beyond consumption. Can this go from a hobby, to a mental exercise, to a full blown lifestyle? Increasingly the answer appears to be YES.

Meet: Jon Bellona | Intermedia-Artist/Programmer/Composer

The idea of expression manifests itself in an array of languages and forms, but the interwoven thread among all remains the same: communication. How can we effectively communicate our idea to others? How can we spark or increase a dialogue between others? The formulation of communicating an idea across boundaries and borders, languages and cultural attitudes, is an art form unto itself and to me, a life-long pursuit of study and craft.

My choice for expression is three-fold, and all my outlets revolve around music in some way: music composition and performance using alternate, data-based controllers; intermedia projects building bridges between technology, music, and other art disciplines; musical writing within two pop outfits (alt-folk Confidant, and noise-pop Pope Blackout). While my communicative choices may oscillate work-by-work (due mainly to the changing nature of technology), I consistently return to these same three modes of intermedia expression.

I choose music because sound is a brilliantly fluid form. From fleeting, natural and man-made sounds that comprise our daily world, to fixed-timbre recordings of our favorite artists available at arm’s reach, to designing and molding completely new timbres, sound resides inside any container that we can conceivably construct. You and I have the ability to touch and shape the sounds around us, casting extremely rigid rules upon sound or enabling the indeterminate manifestations of all sound at any given moment and for any given length of time. Technology has enabled us to sculpt sound completely, and we may create outside of the normative boundaries of instruments and instrumental devices.

Today, there are almost infinite possibilities to formulating music, including prodigious ways to integrate music, visual art, dance, and other art forms together. Today’s Gesamtkunstwerk is a technological collective, a laboratory ripe with beautiful forms and products. Regardless of the degree of directions one could travel along, the song remains the same in our pursuit of artistic expression: the idea of communication and encouraging communication.

Work Sample

(sub)Urban Projections 2015

Zero Crossing

Zero Crossing is a new work that explores different facets of the self through dance, electronic music and projection mapped experimental animation. Premiered at the 2012 (sub)Urban Projections arts festival in Eugene, OR, Zero Crossing represents a new style of work for Harmonic Laboratory.

Four Corners

Chamber

(sub)Urban Projections 2014

Tremor

Tremor is the first movement of a three-movement interactive dance performance. Tremor explores the natural sonic artifacts created by underground lava flows and general seismic activity. Harmonic Lab was responsible for the creative production, including all music, video, and dance. The internal geological conflict and chaos develops throughout, and the sound material, seismic field activity, was obtained by Dr. Milton Garces of the University of Hawaii and Dr. Diana Roman of the University of South Florida. Permission of all audio material was obtained by Dr. Kathy Cashman of the University of Oregon, Dept. of Geological Science.

LIASE

A documentary look into the working process of Harmonic Laboratory and the methods used to create the installation titled “Liaise”. The dual channel installation is showing at Opus VII gallery in Eugene Oregon for the summer of 2011.

Graffiti Test – MatchMove

Process

Harmonic Laboratory has a full exhibition at the Duke Gallery in Harrisonburg, VA. The group has seven works in the exhibition and collaborated with Colin Ives on two of the works (Sanctum and [...More]

Thank you. Harmonic Laboratory at (sub)Urban Projections 2016 could not have made this possible without the support of the following: City of Eugene Cultural Services Isaac Marquez Hult Center [...More]

Thank you. Harmonic Laboratory at (sub)Urban Projections 2015 could not have made this possible without the support of the following: City of Eugene Cultural Services Isaac Marquez Hult Center [...More]

Thank you. Harmonic Laboratory at (sub)Urban Projections 2014 could not have made this possible without the support of the following: Medium Troy: Jojo Ferreira, Jesse Ferreira, Connor Sullivan [...More]